Recovery Ward
by Dr. Jekyl
Summary: The Hirogen's three-week Hunt damaged everyone aboard Voyager in different ways, some more visible than others.


_A/N: Inspired by a short I wrote for the VAMB secret drabble challenge. Appears to be a full-blown return to angst. Feedback, including concrit and mistake catching, is always appreciated._

**-  
Recovery Ward  
-**

The EMH sat down heavily at his makeshift desk in the corner of the storage room that was, for now, serving as Voyager's Sickbay. The room was too hot, too small and jammed too full of scavenged beds and salvaged scanners. Cargo crates stacked in front of the door provided an impromptu blast shield, a remnant of when the fighting had gotten too close for comfort. Scorch marks on the walls also bore silent testament to this.

But the room was otherwise empty. For the first time in just over three weeks, Sickbay was empty. Quiet. Still. No patients and definitely no Hirogen. Just the quiet hum of equipment, the all-pervasive rumble of the ship underway and his own thoughts.

He had expected to feel relieved, at the very least, that it was all over. Perhaps even happy, or triumphant in the face of impossible odds. Not, as he tried to put a name to the new feeling, resigned? Weary? Yes, weary.

Certainly, others had found the release of his last patient, neatly coinciding with the restoration of power to decks seven and eight, to be cause for celebration. Crewmembers would shortly be gathering in the Mess Hall for a party. An unholy alliance of Neelix, Tom Paris and Commander Chakotay had done wonders, apparently. The replicators were working again, after a fashion, and Neelix had unearthed from some hiding place several bottles of spirits that Tom Paris had said were better described as paint stripper, but had elected to add to the punch anyway.

The Doctor frowned at the last. Ten days ago he would have given his mobile emitter for one - just one - of the bottles. With Sickbay proper in ruins, intermittent power and only sporadic replicator access, he'd been labouring away in the most primitive of conditions. Even after ransacking every emergency medkit the salvage parties could lay their hands on, he'd all too quickly found himself in the unwelcome position of rationing staples. Alcohol had several potential clinical uses-

He brushed the thought aside. What was done was done. No point in dwelling on the matter now. Neelix hadn't exactly been on vacation himself over the past few days, and had probably just... forgotten. The Talaxian had a number of annoying traits, but he wouldn't deliberately withhold important supplies.

Besides, it hadn't really mattered in the end. He, Voyager's EMH, was first and foremost a trauma physician of exceptional skill. Improvisation in a crisis was his forte. He'd done exactly what he'd been built to do, and he was confident that no other physician - certainly no flesh-and-blood physician - could have done half as well. They'd have never been able to keep up with the relentless pace for a start- he'd actually broken all manner of records for a single, unsupported physician. That almost all of the Voyager crew were here today to join in the celebrations was a testament to that fact unlike any other. He should be proud.

He sighed and redirected his attention outwards and to the stacks of reports haphazardly strewn across his desk, grabbing the topmost one. He'd never had the time to properly document most of the cases he'd seen throughout the ordeal; now he faced the unenviable task of reconstructing treatment histories from his own memory files and what few notes he'd managed to take and putting them into a format for consumption by others. The Captain wanted preliminary reports on her desk tomorrow. Even if that hadn't been the case, he would have made it a priority; every crew member deserved to know exactly what had happened to them over the past three weeks.

The first name sprang out at him, along with a torrent of accompanying data. Austin Chang. One of Tuvok's men, recently tapped to be part of the new Hazard Team. Not the most popular man on the ship, the Doctor recalled, but level-headed and quick on his mental feet. He'd been one of the first to be sent into the Hunt and had come back a little more than fifteen minutes later, having left his right arm and most of his blood behind on the holodeck floor. And that had only been the start for poor Mr. Chang. It had taken the Hirogen several days to learn what wounds would incapacitate and satisfy blood-lust without becoming immediately life threatening.

Not that most of them seemed to care about such distinctions in any case. He'd actually started to suspect that some of the younger Hirogen had turned it into a game in and of itself - how much damage could they inflict upon their fragile 'prey' before the holographic doctor was unable to put them back together again?

He shuddered mentally, and moved down the list.

Megan Delaney. The Hirogen had been more than a little intrigued by the idea of identical twins. Apparently such a thing was utterly unheard of in their species. Instead of being hunted en mass like most of the other junior officers, sister was pit against sister in a bizarre attempt to determine which was the superior prey, or some other such nonsense. Jenny caught her twin square in the chest with a barbed arrow. Megan returned the favour a few days later with what could only have been a flamethrower of some description. The very next day it was knives, and both on the biobeds. And so it went, unabated for two weeks before they'd been so worn down that he'd been able to get them into what he'd laughably called the recovery ward.

The list of injuries sustained by the pair, though obviously very worrisome, ultimately hadn't bothered him as much as his growing concern over what would happen if one actually killed the other - and then survived the rest of the ordeal. It was the first time he had ever seriously contemplated falsifying medical records. The guilt...

Vorik. As an engineering officer, he had been spared the Hunt to work on expanding the hologrid. Spared, that was, until the Hirogen has discovered the Crusades - and superior Vulcan strength. The first the Doctor had known of Vorik's unwilling participation in the 'fun' was his sudden materialisation, along with four others, on the Sickbay floor, still wearing the chainmail and heavy leather ever so thoughtfully replicated for them. Liberally splattered with gore and managing ten seriously injured patients from the battle already, the Doctor had just stared at them in something akin to hopeless incomprehension for the several seconds it took for his programming to adapt to the unwelcome development and reassign treatment priorities accordingly.

Sudden and unexpected guilt rose with the memory. He should have been quicker to react. Three of the five had died before he had the chance to cut them out of their armour, and only one of those had been able to be revived. Every second had been precious, and he'd stood there like... like a statue while they died of blood loss and blunt trauma.

He dropped the PADD and rested his head in his hands; the pre-programmed gesture had always brought comfort of a sort, though he wasn't entirely sure why.

This reaction of his made little sense. The cold, core analytical part of his triage programming ran the numbers again; he'd chosen correctly, if belatedly, to stabilise Vorik and Inas first. The other three had possessed a negligible chance of survival even if he had acted instantly. It should follow that he accept the losses of Ceren and Weisel with professional detachment, and be inordinately pleased by the survival of Dedek. He shouldn't feel as though he'd been tested and found wanting.

It was too long since he'd had any prolonged downtime. That was it. It had been almost a month since he'd been offline long enough to run basic maintenance tasks, and twice that since B'Elanna had sat down to run the rough diagnostics she'd rebuilt. His buffer had to be cluttered with all sorts of junk data by now, and the level of memory fragmentation didn't bear thinking about. Now that Sickbay was clear, he could go offline and get things sorted-

The swish of doors abruptly reminded the Doctor that, as always, he was on public display. It wouldn't do to have a crewmember catch his moment of, well... he wasn't entirely sure what it was. Introspection? He had an image to maintain, and confidence to inspire, after all. He was indefatigable, his judgement on medical matters absolute and perfect first-time, his confidence unshakable.

He straightened quickly but resisted the urge to rise to his feet, and began arranging the reports in front of him into some semblance of order. He'd determined after some judicious experimentation - at Kes's urging, it had to be said - that most crewmen, unless severely injured, generally didn't like to be met at the door, but preferred instead for him to acknowledge them only when they came into view of his office or made deliberate noise. Anything sooner was 'unnaturally quick' and put them on edge, while waiting much longer made them feel like a secondary priority.

He found himself, for the first time, glad that Kes wasn't aboard Voyager anymore. Her mental resolve couldn't be faulted and her help would have been invaluable, but Ocampans weren't physically the most robust of species. The Humans -let alone the Hirogen- would have torn through her like so much tissue paper, and over the years he'd come to have a real dread of seeing her wind up on one of his biobeds. What if he couldn't save her? Her death, then, would be his fault.

There were others now, as he'd learned to become friends with more of the crew, whose Sickbay appearances he'd come to dread; he'd seen each and every one of them multiple times over the past weeks. Seeing Kes as abused as the others would have been too much to bear.

After the appropriate amount of time, he looked up and rose, making his way out from behind his desk. Balanced on two empty supply crates, the thin plastic slab wobbled alarmingly, nearly sending one PADD to the floor.

"Mr. Kim. Shouldn't you be off celebrating? Or sleeping?" he added, noting the numerous signs of fatigue on the Ensign's face.

"I'm not really in the mood for celebrating." Harry offered him a smile that was as wan as it was fleeting. "And I haven't had a decent night's sleep since this whole thing began. I just can't seem to relax."

"I can't say I'm surprised," the Doctor admitted. Harry was not the first such case through his door the past few days. "Insomnia is a common reaction to severe stress for humans and, it's been a very..." he trailed off, searching his vocabulary index for an appropriate word," ..._trying_ month."

"Trying isn't exactly the word I'd use, Doc," Harry sighed, hopping on to the nearest bed.

"I suppose the term doesn't really do it justice, no," he agreed, giving the Ensign a quick once-over: nothing to preclude his initial diagnosis of stress-induced insomnia. However, it was a problem whose source he was, much as he hated to admit it, actually rather ill-equipped to handle. Psy_chiatry_, yes - he could play around with brain chemistry in his sleep (well, if he actually _slept,_ that was). Anything more than basic psy_chology_, no. If he ever had the change to meet his programmers, he'd be sure to complain about the lack.

He closed the tricorder and placed it back on the dented instrument tray.

"On any other starship-" he began.

"You'd tell me to see the counsellor. Since we don't have one, you can give me a sleeping aid and suggest I talk to someone about my experiences," Harry finished for him. "I've done this before."

"Eight times, as a matter of fact." The Ensign had been plagued by sleeping difficulties ever since being rescued from the Akritirian prison on Stardate 50175.6. "A new Voyager record." He found his own smile at this little factoid to be as tight as Harry's had been wan.

He selected and loaded a hypospray, and turned back, holding it out for the Ensign.

"Once, thirty minutes before bed for a week. Try to return to your normal evening routine and take no caffeine or other stimulants after 1300 hours. If you're still having trouble after that, come and see me again."

"Got it," Harry said, accepting the hypospray. He twirled it in his fingers, but made no move to hop down off the bed.

"Was there something else?" he prompted. He'd never admit it, but Harry was one of his favourite patients. He was quiet, could be trusted to follow instructions, didn't forget to take his medicine and (when he hadn't contracted some new and really interesting disease , or died again) was typically in and out of Sickbay in under five minutes.

Harry appeared to consider this.

"Are _you_ all right?" he asked.

"Me?" he began, nonplussed by the unaccustomed inquiry from an unexpected source. People rarely inquired as to his wellbeing unless he was suffering from a visible malfunction. He could typically pigeonhole such inquires immediately: Kes, out of compassion; Tom Paris, out of curiosity; the Captain or the Commander, out of responsibility... What was the ensign's motive? "I'm fine. Why do you ask?"

"Well, I was thinking," Harry said slowly, twirling the hypospray again, "for us, in Engineering, the beatings were one thing. We're trained to deal with hostile occupation. The really hard part was having to stand by and watch the rest of the crew be... _hunted_, like animals, and not being able to do anything about it." The Ensign's voice was oddly harsh with restrained anger, his grip on the hypospray white-knuckled, cheeks flushed and pupils constricted. "And then I thought about what it must have been like in Sickbay. Patching people up only to send them back out to get hurt over and over again. I know that every crewmember's been through here at least three times in the past month. I'll bet a lot of the injuries have been pretty major."

"This has been exactly the sort of situation I'm built for, ensign," he said lightly, hoping to fob Harry off. Prized patient, yes; confidant, no.

"And Sickbay got blown up."

He'd actually put a temporary block on that particular line of thought after he'd found it made him distressed enough to affect his performance. Sickbay, for all he complained these days about not having quarters of his own, was his home, and he'd formed a strong emotional attachment to it, one which had surprised him in its depth. While it hadn't been _utterly_ gutted in the explosion, the damage was severe and would take at least another week to fix. And he hadn't even had time yet to sift through the rubble to see if any of his treasured few possessions had survived.

"It's inconvenient, certainly," he admitted, again keeping his voice light, even as the distress came flooding back. He cast around for something to do, a problem to solve nearby that would divert resources, his attention, from the feeling, and settled on restoring the instrument tray to its original shape. He was built to _do_, not to stand around talking, and he always felt better when he was doing something with his hands. "But repairing Sickbay is the highest priority for engineering crews after the Bridge and fully sealing the hull." He paused. "Why the sudden interest in my wellbeing?"

"You did say I should talk to someone."

Again he found himself on the mental back foot.

"I didn't mean – I mean, I appreciate your vote of confidence, Mr. Kim, but I doubt I'm the right person for that. Perhaps Mr. Paris-"

The tray audibly 'popped' back into its correct shape, and he came face to face with his reflection. No wonder the ensign was pushing: he actually looked upset. Quite badly. He cursed, not for the first time, his programmers for going the extra mile to make him appear human.

"Tom wasn't there, Doc. He'd be sympathetic, I know, but he wouldn't really understand what it was like. It was just you, me, Ashmore by the end. Everyone else was thrown into the simulation."

"Perhaps Ensign Ashmore then."

"We've already been talking about it, a bit." Harry hopped down of the biobed and, after a moment of hesitation, reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. "He wanted to know how you were doing too. I don't mean to be pushy, but if you do want someone to talk to, you know where I'll be. Ashmore too. "

"I... I'll bear that in mind," he said quietly, without looking up.

"It does help. Really."

With that, Harry dropped his hand and turned for the door. The Doctor looked up from his reflection to watch him go.

Kes and Tom Paris had introduced discussion to him as a way of solving his more difficult 'emotional' problems. It wasn't entirely uncommon for him to feel something that ran counter to how he was originally programmed, or to experience something so alien that he simply had no frame of reference for it, let alone any idea of what to do about it. The external analysis and independent feedback they provided helped determine if it was an appropriate reaction to the stimuli and therefore a 'natural' part of his development, or an error. In the event of the former, their personal experiences and cultural backgrounds typically left them better prepared than he to identify probable causes and proffer solutions.

Even they might have had trouble with this situation, though. He couldn't think of an experience they might have had that could compare with these last few weeks, healing horrific injuries done to people he cared about, only so they could be sent back out to suffer again and again and again, because the only other alternative was to let them die...

Harry had seen it, though. His perspective had been different, but he'd actually been forced, if not to write the programs that caused so much injury, but to make it possible for more and more of his friends and colleagues to participate in the Hunt.

"Ensi- Harry?"

"Doc?" The ensign stopped just before the blast shield, and turned back to face him.

"I... may take you up on that offer," he began awkwardly, unsure how to frame both his request and convey his gratitude. "Later. When you've had some rest, perhaps, and I've had... some extended downtime. Thank you, though. And Ensign Ashmore. For thinking of me."

Harry's smile, if still tired, was more genuine this time.

"Someone's got to. See you tomorrow."


End file.
